Q&A: How do people recover deleted files on a computer hard drive anyway?

Question by One Piece RULES!!: How do people recover deleted files on a computer hard drive anyway?
I’m pretty computer savvy, my guess is they retroactively go into your window’s backup files and restores them retroactively.

If you manually deleted your files through the recycle bin you can do a system restore by selecting a time you would like to restore to, meaning your computer goes “back in time” according to the time you set it to.

You need to download a program specifically for “unerase.” Best bet is to find one from a reliable source like microsoft. I’ve found a decent on at http://www.tech-pro.net/how-to-recover-deleted-files.html. Some files are unrecoverable but most can be restored. Make sure you download the version for your specific operating system. ie. Vista, Mac, Window 7 whatever.

Many files can be recovered that are not stored in system checkpoints by system restore. You’ll be pleasantly suprised I’m sure.

Deleted files can sometimes be recovered by people (experts!) by examining the raw data on the HDD, You see, when a file is ‘deleted’, the space on the HDD it is really only marked as not needed any more, so another file will eventually be put in that space – but the data is actually still there!

If you need to avoid this possibility, use a free program something like Eraser to ’shred’ the data, or CCleaner which can wipe the free space for you.

When you delete files the data itself isn’t deleted, just the index entry that tells the system where the data for those files is located. The area containing the deleted data is also now marked as free space so it is available for any new files to be written there instead.

That’s how recovery program works. As for the software, I use asoftech photo recovery pro, value of money.